Cordless telephony or "telepoint" gives a telepoint subscriber access to the public switched network via the subscriber's telepoint terminal and analog radio base stations.
These base stations enable the subscriber to make a call over the public network, they provide local authentication of the calling subscriber and they control call charging. Throughout the duration of a call, the subscriber must remain within range of the base station through which the call was set up since on moving out of range the call will be cut off, there being no subscriber tracking. Such a telepoint system suffers from the following drawbacks:
calling subscriber authentication is not fully reliable, opening the door to fraud; this is because each base station is provided with its own authentication and charging means and having a multiplicity of such means can lead to fraud, particularly with respect to authentication since blacklist updating takes place once a day, at best; PA0 there is no way of routing incoming calls to a telepoint subscriber, since the system does not know the location of the called subscriber; PA0 call charging becomes complex if the number of "operators" and the number of base stations are large; and PA0 only a limited number of types of call can be made. PA0 network service control points each connected to the public switched network, and each having a data base of cordless telephone service subscribers for processing the following functions in real time: caller authentication; setting up calls; and establishing call-charging tickets; and PA0 a managing service control point controlling said data bases and providing commercial management for the cordless telephone service, said management relating to processing call-charging tickets; PA0 said service control point network having the architecture of an intelligent network; and PA0 each base station being connected to the public switched network via a 2B+D or 30B+D type channel, said public network being an integrated services network.
An object of the invention is to improve caller authentication.
Another object of the invention is to enable an incoming call to be routed to a telepoint subscriber.
Another object of the invention is to improve and simplify call-charging functions.